Vanuatu on the alert against prawn white spot disease

Australia has alerted its trading partners including Vanuatu of the white spot disease on its prawns and authorities in Vanuatu are on the alert to make sure Vanuatu does not get the disease.

Wikipedia says: “The disease is highly lethal and contagious, killing shrimps quickly.

"Outbreaks of this disease have wiped out within a few days the entire populations of many shrimp farms throughout the world.”

Director of the Department of Biosecurity, Timothy Tumukon, says they are now working on import measures to be instituted in the next couple of weeks to ensure that prawns coming from everywhere including Asia will only be cooked prawns.

“That will be something that we will have to institute as an import protocol for prawns,” he told The Vanuatu Nightly News’ Kizzy Kalsaskau.

“We have done surveys and we have found that we do not have a white spot disease in Vanuatu.

"And now we have been alerted of the situation happening in Australia and we are in the process of thinking how we are going to address that.”

Tumukon says there have been a lot of prawns that have appeared in supermarkets and shops in the two towns – Port Vila and Luganville and “we are very worried about that. So we will be taking steps to manage that".

He says we do not have mechanism to use in Vanuatu to identify the disease in our prawns, but he adds that the disease itself is very detectable.

“When you look at the prawns you can spot this disease in them.

"Having said that any processed product that comes to the supermarket shelves or supermarket freezers is quite hard to detect because some of these crustaceans, they have removed the outer shells so it’s hard to detect whether it has the disease or not.

“So the best thing to do is to apply the precautionary principle which is to make sure that the prawns are cooked to a certain degree that gives us guarantee that it’s killed off the disease agent before they can export to Vanuatu.”

Biosecurity Director Tumukon says we have got only one commercial prawn farm in Vanuatu and if the disease actually gets hold of this particular farm then we will have to shut it down.

“Having said that, we have a lot of rivers and streets that there are prawns in their natural environment, they will also be affected,” he warns.

“So, we are taking measures to control any prawn or prawn products that come to Vanuatu in the near future.”